Numerical Pricing of European Options with Arbitrary Payoffs

In this paper we introduce the CHEB method, a quadrature-based methodology for the fast and accurate pricing of European options with arbitrary payoffs. The method comes as a natural application of Chebfun, a numerical computing software package built on the approximation properties of Chebyshev series and Chebyshev interpolants. For the methodology to be useful for practical purposes, we address two considerations: the recovery of the underlying’s density from the characteristic function, and the estimation of the truncation error. We highlight an important connection between the proposed technique and the very efficient COS method, in which the payoff and density function are approximated by cosine series.